High Res Downloads

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Tony, spud, I screwed up royally. After a certain point in the recording (before this song), the balanced shifted hugely. Someone moved the mike? Nope, someone hit a switch (I hope not me) with put in MS matrixing. Oops. I fixed it and now things should sound mo' better. Ditto the 16 vs 24 bit problem- this was the first time I used Goldsound for mastering and there were a couple things I missed. Also fixed.

Lee Barber Live - Tin Foil Satellite MS by Stuart Yaniger on SoundCloud - Create, record and share your sounds for free
 
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OK I didn't know what that was, so looked it up. So effectively the recorder thought it had another additional mic (to the Blumlein) and encoded based on that configuration?

I'll have to download tonight and have a listen, I assume it was something you could fix in the mastering, ie it wasn't irreversible.

I'm interested to see if I can pick a difference between the web playback (mp3) and the high quality. I suspect I won't be able to pick a difference between 16 and 24 bit (but you never know). Perhaps with headphones...

Tony.
 
I've listened to the three of these, last night and just now. This last one is far superior to the last two. A very natural sound with the voice image a tiny bit left of center. Could be my computer speakers (Monsoons) slightly off balance, but I don't think so. And reasonable sounding depth, by the applause, for a living room preformance. Nice job.
 
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Weird, must have been a glitch. I'm downloading now. :xeye:

EDIT: SY, I did some mild peak limiting and then brought up the overall level a few dB. Still very dynamic, about 25dB average to peak ratio.
Saved as a 96/24 FLAC it's about 125meg. As a 96/16 FLAC about 61 MEG.
 
Ah... ok. I listened to the track last night a few times. It sounded very good but I was getting a bit of odd imaging. Similar but not quite like wintermute described; I thought the difference was due to my center-channel. I'm just an amateur with an amateur's system but I thought it was impressive hi-fi. Nice work from the artist and sound man. I've d/l'd the fix. I'm off to have another few listens.
 
To me the most interesting aspect of the recording is that his voice doesn't sound as pale as it does live, compared to the guitar. Is this due to the height of the microphone placement?

It does help to have live versus recorded comparisons!:D Yes, the mike placement was less than optimal to accommodate 20 people in my living room- I think I would want to move it back slightly. There is background noise from refrigerators, A/C, and my computer's fan. Anyway, a fun test of the concepts, we'll do some more optimized stuff (no crowd in the room) in a few weeks. I am blown away to be working with someone like Lee; he's a cult figure in the singer/songwriter community here in Austin.

Appreciate everyone's feedback.
 
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Just listened to the latest one :) Much better imaging :nod:

I thought I noticed some slight clipping (or harshness) just on the first couple of lyrics (around 30 - 35 secs), but I listened again and don't hear it, so I may have had the levels up a bit high to start and clipped my amp (or possibly the crappy dac on the onboard sound on my HT-PC.

You said earlier you were very happy with these mic's and preamp. You should be!! It's bloody excellent :D

Will be going into my reference recordings for sure.

I'm still not 100% sure about the sound stage, but that could well be my room/setup :) It sounds a little bit wide I think, but it is hard to put a finger on it. But to put that into context I don't think that my current setup is capable of producing a really good sound stage, so take that comment with a very large grain of salt. I think Pano's impressions would be more valuable :)

Actually thinking about it more (but keep in mind that bucket of salt) I think the issue (if there is one) is that the guitar and voice don't quite seem to be in the right space with respect to one another. Almost like he is holding the guitar off to his left side in an awkward way if that makes sense :)

Tony.
 
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Yes, very nice job. Very clean, very dynamic. I can hear the background noise on headphones, but it's very low. Can also clearly hear your living room. Finding a space with great acoustics will make your recordings really top notch. Your mic and electronics are clean enough to bring that to life. It will be the icing on the cake, for sure.

Call or email me if you want a walk thru on the peak limiting and volume settings.
 
Just a note on Sound Cloud hostings;

Downloads from soundcloud will be at the same rate as the upload but if you listen to tracks using the soundcloud interface (IE stream from soundcloud) they are a compressed priority format.

For quality always download well recorded soundcloud files.
 
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I used the peak limiting as you suggested on the applause, but want to avoid it during the music. On a few of the other songs, some of the ambient noises are spooky-real.

I peak limited the applause and reduced its volume by 6dB. I also did a few other tricks like:
  • High pass at 40Hz. Cleans up the bad parts of the room tone and noise.
  • Low pass at 36Khz. It's just noise up there. Tried a LP at 22K, but it took some "shine" off the strings, even tho I can't hear that high.
  • Gentle peak limiting (~3dB) on some sections of the Left track, notable at about 39 sec and 1 minute something.
  • Reduced Left volume 2.5dB
  • Did not change overall volume, did not need it.
For me these small changes were good improvements. The result is cleaner and warmer. More about the music and less about recording artifacts. Still very live and dynamic, much more so than typical commercial releases.

It's easy to do and hear if you like the results or not.
 
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